Running Army Wife

Heh. I definitely just had a flashback to listening to Relient K a whole bunch in early high school when I typed out that title. But that's what I'm doing. Pressing on. I got a job co-teaching a class in Chicago once a week, and I'm currently trying to find a part-time job to occupy me for the rest of the week. One thing I can say though.. people tend to treat you pretty well when you've got a husband deployed. Since I'm not living by the base, the YMCA offers free memberships to military wives whose husbands are deployed reservists, national guard, OR if the soldier is active and the wife has relocated (like to live with family.. like me!). The point is to give military wives a community during deployment if they are not near the military community. SO. I got my membership and went to my very first cycling and very first pilates class yesterday. Wow. First of all, the cycling class was really hard. 30 minutes into the 1 hour class, I was really starting to wa...

Well. I had this whole post written up about how difficult it was to say goodbye on the day that my husband left for Afghanistan. But I decided to wait to post it, because of OPSEC . He's now to his destination safely, but I still have to decided to not post that original thing I wrote. It was pretty long, emo, and no one would have wanted to read it. In short, it was the hardest day of my life to date. The best word I can use to describe how I feel now is surreal. I dreaded it for about 6 years and then it finally happened. Kind of like when you wonder for years what it will be like to be married and then you're standing there with your new husband, having just walked back down the aisle hand-in-hand and you're like Wow, we're married . I'm left here thinking Wow, he's actually deployed now.  This little comic sums up how the goodbye was: Right now, a year seems like a really long time.

So this is long overdue, but my life has been a bit crazy lately. Well, I was hoping for a 1:57:30. I felt more prepared for this half than I was for the Chicago Half Marathon in September (1:59:20), so shaving a couple seconds off each mile didn't seem too much to hope for.  I guess I underestimated the hills. Eek. We have some hills around our apartment, but nothing compared to this course we ran downtown. I was on pace for the first 5 miles or so, but then it started catching up with me. I finished at a 2:02:38. So an average 9:21 per mile, compared to Chicago's 9:06 per mile. Crazy how 15 seconds per mile adds up so much. But considering the hills versus the super-flat Chicago course, I decided I'm not too upset.  And of course, it rained. The weather was actually not to bad. Around 50 degrees, which is perfect for a race like this.  My wonderful hubby took all the pictures. This is the second half marathon that he's run with me as my photographer/sh...

Here is one of my Christmas presents to my hubby. Since we celebrated Christmas early, I can safely post this. I spotted this project on pinterest a couple months ago and I thought it was the cutest idea. Then I started thinking... my hubby is going to be gone on his deployment for a year. 1 Year= 52 weeks. 52 cards in a deck. How perfect! So yeah, he missed the change over to 9 month deployments and that sucks BUT at least the year-long 52 weeks works perfectly for this little project. Gotta count the little positives! But I put my own little spin on it.  On the outside, it looks the same:  I still printed out 52 reasons why I love my hubby. Some silly, some a little more serious, some I wouldn't post online ;). And attached the little slips of paper with packing tap since we've got plenty of that laying around recently. NOTE: You MUST put packing tape or contact paper over the regular paper. Otherwise, the ink will get scratched off with the paint and...